A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
